SCIENTISTS AND EDUCATORS ESTABLISH NEW BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE INSTITUTE ON THE SEACOAST

The Seacoast Biomedical Science Institute filed Articles with the state December 2015

February 8, 2016 - York, Maine

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The Board of Directors have announced the creation of the Seacoast Biomedical Science Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to research, service, community outreach, and education.

“SBSI was first envisioned for work toward new treatments, lab tests, and preventative strategies for understudied diseases,” said Nancy Wells, President of the Board of Directors. “We formally established SBSI with the added mission of providing new educational and community outreach initiatives as well.”

“We choose to prioritize challenging problems in biomedical science such as new laboratory tests for Lyme disease. Many of these problems remain unsolved because they are considered too technically difficult or too time-consuming with current scientific tools. Because of this, they are often not prioritized for study by major granting agencies despite their disease costs. At SBSI, we do not accept these as reasons to limit our attempts to solve these problems,” said Wells, a retired health science professor and nurse practitioner.

The focus on community outreach and education stem from the desire to increase science literacy across the board. These initiatives will include original classroom activities that will be freely available to teachers in public schools, “TED-style” talks for the local or internet community, and a new local museum. The Museum of Microbes and Medicine will feature interdisciplinary and interactive exhibits and will also be freely open to the public. SBSI also includes a division for service work for the public, companies, and other biomedical scientists. Services include microbiome banking, microbiome sequencing, bacterial culture collection deposition, culture distribution, evolutionary analysis, and scientific design consultation.

“We are taking a wide range of approaches to funding our non-profit institute,” said Graeme Crowther, a “STEM” educator and the Treasurer of the Board of Directors. “We plan to sustain and expand operations through competitive grants, our service division, and tax-deductible donations. We pledge to support the seacoast area, and hope the community will support us in our early phase.”

SBSI is raising funds for Federal non-profit organization filing costs and startup personnel costs. Donations are text exempt retroactive to December 2015.

To learn more about SBSI research, education/outreach, and service projects or to donate to SBSI, please visit www.SeacoastBiomedicalScience.org.

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